Aspen, CO — Fortune Brainstorm Tech

Barry Diller made an impassioned plea to the nation’s technology leaders to join the fight for net neutrality. Speaking at the Fortune Magazine Brainstorm Tech Conference at the Aspen Institute, Diller, CEO of Interactive Corporation (IAC) took on the big telco’s desire to control the gateways to the Internet.

Interviewed by Fortune Managing Editor, Andy Serwer Diller went on to declare his “love” for the iPad. He added that he did not love his iPad as much as his dog.

Diller believes that over time, the pay wall concept currently deployed by The New York Times will work. Media companies should be experimenting with all platforms and pay models. Diller also took on google over it’s market share.

Finally, answering a question about TV, he believes that broadcast media will begin to be available on a paid basis.

Aspen, CO, BrainstormTech: Brian McAndrews and Wes Nichols declare the concept of online engagement is only an intermediate metric and does not relate to sales data.

Friday July 22– Fortune Brainstorm Tech, @ The Aspen Institute

At the branding panel with Wes Nichols, (Marketshare Partners), Tom Bedecarre (AKQA), Brian McAndrews, (now a VC) Barry Saltzman (Google)

Room full of investors, agency CEOs, analysts all agreeing that social media will be the engine that finally moves big media dollars online.

My admonition to the radio industry to get off its butt @ Radio Ink Convergence Summit last night: http://ht.ly/1UbYT

As ConferenceHound.com growls its way out of its winter of discontent and hibernation, we are taking a few surveys about what motivates you to attend a conference or trade show.  This survey is exactly one question long and we'd sure appreciate it, if you could find a few seconds to give us your opinion .  We think it's three clicks and about 15 seconds to complete. 

There's no sense in not taking a few more cheap punches while the Adobe Flash platform is reeling on the mat.

Not for Steve Jobs. Not for me.

 

Back in the depths of the dot com crash, I remember the sages of my rump agency expounding, like the plastics salesman to Dustin Hoffman's Ben in The Graduate,  "One Word: Flash". A generation of expensive flash developers was born. Design shops, Ad Agencies, Fashion Brands could not stumble over each other fast enough to build Flashy, Splashy Web intros on their sites. 

Micro-sites in flash, rich media banners in flash, video in flash, Flash in Flash.  Macromedia wins. Adobe buys out the platform.  Party is on. 

Along comes buzz kill Apple which does not support Flash in it its nascent iPhone.  Worse, this Ipad, this arriviste, this nifty hug-it-in-your-lap in your Ralph Lauren earth tone beddings, Kindle-killing, gargantuan iPod Touch comes along. Suddenly, every hipster company and brand is left with a website home page that looks like a highway construction zone for a collapsed bridge. Media publishers, heavily invested in Flash video can't strut their stuff on the newest, coolest delivery system out there. Magazine publishers are all over the iPad as the savior of journalism. 

To your left, you will see a beautiful screen capture of the appearance of the home page of the evidently misnamed "Design Agency" as it appears this morning on my iPad. 

Would you like to hire them? Would you know how to contact them? Do you know what they do?

Can you hear the collective whine from Flash developers and award winner wannabes?

Guess what? Steve doesn't care about you and your piddling Flash problems: Steve Jobs: Thoughts on Flash .

Actually neither do I. Flash hegemony can't end soon enough.  Why?

• Site developers and publishers who entice their clients or bosses into Flashy, Splashy Home pages are instantaneously guarantying their clients sub-standard SEO discoverability on major search engines. Unless you really know what you are doing, the text within a Flash unit is not indexable  
• Have you ever tried to cut and paste a company's contact information from an Adobe Flash site into your contacts?  Fuhggedaboudit. Next company please.
• Flash developers, in my experience, are really nice, frequently talented, always expensive, hard-to-find and for the most part usually gone surfing (the waves, sunshine, not the web)..  Good people, many of them, but after paying them endlessly to fix their own bugs, it gets old.
• Which brings me to the platform itself.  I'm not a developer, but I don't need a computer science degree from Stanford or a design degree from RISD to know that this platform is extremely buggy, requiring lots of QA, lots of long conversations with clients about bugginess, and not at all easy to edit by "the rest of us".

So while there has no doubt been some tremendous commercial art completed in flash, not to speak of insane budgets (even I, speak as someoneonce succesfully enlisted to sell a client  a $95,000 flash banner requiring a helicoper shoot), the end can't come soon enough.

The iPad may or may not be the next killer platform, but every content publisher is going to think twice about continuing to develop content that will be unusable on the newest coolest device — not to speak of its older, possibly cooler cousin, the iPhone.

HTML 5 Baby. Bring it on.

Oh, and if you just checked your site on your iPad and discovered the horror of it all, our Barbary Coast Subsidiary might be able to help you solve the problem quickly.

From Press Release land .. and the The Wall Street Journal

"The U.S. online ad market started a turnaround in the second half of
last year, says research from PricewaterhouseCoopers and the Interactive
Advertising Bureau:"

Well, what else would they say?

"U.S. online ad spending for the fourth quarter totaled a
record $6.3 billion — a rise of 2.6%."

OK, that's good.  The interesting thing about "online ad spending" numbers is that they massively understate the dollars that are spent in online marketing.  The IAB (the web publisher's advocacy group and don't forget it) is naturally going to tell Price-Waterhouse to define "online ad spending" as transactions between an advertiser and a web publisher. Fair enough. But, big but, the definition of what constitutes "online ad spending" could be looked at in a much different way.

What if we defined online ad spending as any transaction that creates an impression, whether it is a transaction between a publisher and an advertiser or between a consultant and an advertiser.  By this I mean that as dollars have flowed (and plenty have) into "social media" and the old standby "web development" and various kinds of "optimization", none of that gets recorded as "online ad spending."  And yet all of those dollars are doing exactly what ad dollars are supposed to be doing.

This creates some interesting winners and losers:

The Winners: Social Media & Optimization budgets

The winners are optimization-focused and social savvy agencies (of all kinds, btw) and consultants who understand that their economic future and their clients' both get better every time they can convert a dollar earmarked for traditional "media" into fees for services such as ghost twittering, landing page optimization, content creation and on and on.

The other winners are the advertisers who recognize this. At a recent OMMA panel moderated by AKQA's @TomBed, Marty Collins of Microsoft's Windows answered my question regarding their ROI tracking on cost-per-impression for social media versus the cost-per-impression for traditional media by saying, "social media blows traditional away.  It's not even close."  (To be fair, she went on to add that her view, which I agree with is that not all impressions are created equal.) 

The Online Ad Losers: Web Publishers

The losers, oddly, and notwithstanding the $6.3 billion "measured" by the IAB, are the publishers.  Smart media consultants, ad agencies and PR agencies are recognizing that for fees that stay with them they can create impressions at a fraction of the cost of "traditional" online media.  All the better if they get to keep a much larger portion of the "media" budget as fees –rather than acting as a bank for the advertisers and skimming, at best, 15% off the top.  So the smart gatekeepers over online spending are rapidly building rationales for massive cuts to the "online ad" spending the IAB is boasting about

Will this turns into a wave?  Is it possible that "online ad spending" is the wriong metric.  Maybe it's online ad spending + fees collected by smart agencies and consultants.  And, my guess is that that (unmeasurable) number is growing at a way faster pace than 2.6%.

What do you think?

A bold prediction:  The iPad will exceed all but the most optimistic analyst expectations.

Here's why:

• Everyone I know who has held and touched the thing is in love with it.
• David Pogue and Walt Mossberg gave it the coveted NY Times and the Wall Street Journal Two thumbs up.  Where are you Roger Ebert? More precisely where is your thumb?
• Traditional publishers (like magazines and newspapers) love the device and they love the business model and they are already investing heavily in their iPad channel, a channel where they believe they can finally sell subscriptions and build a pay wall that won't be breached.
• Game publishers are going insane developing apps as you read this

And the number one reason I think the iPad will be successful…..

I've stopped watching TV and seem to spend my evenings in my big ole TV watching Barca Lounger using my iPhone.

I don't think I'm alone. 

Give me a bigger screen with today's newspapers and magazines, my email, my music, my "Risk" app.  Sign me and 10 million people up.  Must have iPad. Must have iPad. Must have iPad.

Tomorrow morning, we'll be blogging photos of the Ipaddies camped out by the Apple store at the Corte Madera Mall, I guarantee they will be there.

Today's @digitalaxle press release re SEO, Usability Consulting gig with Enterprise Mashup leader, Convertigo: http://ow.ly/1tIgR